About an hour past sunset as he trudged his way home—a 4 by 6 jhuggi made of mud and corrugated iron— to Tughlaqabad on an especially chilly January day in Delhi, Saqib worried how he and his family would survive the cold night.
By the time he reached home, his wife and three children had lit a small fire in the open and were huddled around it, along with some of his neighbours.
Saqib’s is one of the many families that live around the ruins of the Tughlaqabad Fort in makeshift slums. These families have been forced by the biting cold to leave the pavements they usually lived on to take shelter under their makeshift roofs.
In the face of a pandemic, this year's winter will be a hard one for the homeless to weather. With mercury dipping to the lowest minimum temperature setting at 2.4 degrees Celsius this season— five notches below normal—this is the lowest minimum temperature recorded in six years in January.
Hundreds of homeless people have begun looking for night shelters. While some shelters have electric heaters, most of the occupants have to settle for a blanket and a plywood bed with a thin mattress.
"We saw people around us freezing to death on the pavement by the morning. At least a shelter gives us a chance to survive. Outside, we might be safe from Covid-19, but will the cold spare us?” said Raju, a cart puller who moved to a shelter in south Delhi’s Green Park.
The fear of the "disease" is taking shape fast in the residents' minds, who are compelled to inhabit the tiny closed room with several people, hence raising the possibility of transmission. Revenue Department officials said that they deploy medical personnel to shelters on a daily basis and that no new residents were being allocated space without a Covid-19 exam. Those identified as positive are being sent to government-run treatment facilities, officials stated.
The Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board (DUSIB) runs 213 shelters in the city, with the total capacity of 18,000 residents. However, as a result of social distancing guidelines, the capacity has decreased to about 7,000 this year, added a senior revenue official.
Capacity is grossly insufficient, provided that unofficial figures – the Government of Delhi doesn't have an official figure – put the homeless population in the capital at 150,000.
In the winter, shelters all over the city see an occupancy of around 11,000. The Government plans to overcome this divide with the Winter Action Plan. The proposal contains 250 new tents, compared to 75 in 2019 and 60 in 2018. Of the 250 additional tents, 100 have since been set up in the last 10 days, distributed over 22 areas, said the senior DUSIB official.
"At the moment, shelters and extra tents cater to about 7,000 people at night. There's a possibility that there could be less occupancy this year, since many of the ones who travelled to their villages during the lockdown didn't come back. But as more people arrive, we will increase the capacity," the official said.
That being said, the level at which homeless people are trying to find shelter has long exceeded the level at which new tents are being put up, said Rajeev Kapoor, executive director of the RDM Social Welfare Society, which is one of many NGOs in charge of maintaining shelters in the region.
"The schools in the area will not be opened, at least until the end of the winter. What's preventing the authorities from utilising school buildings as shelters? In addition, the day-to-day supply of many essential amenities – from electrical heating systems to medicines – was impacted by the pandemic crunch of the funds. It will be a tough winter to pass," Kapoor said.
A member of the Supreme Court-appointed advisory group for night shelters in Delhi, who did not want to be named, said:
"A review meeting of the group is expected later this week to address all issues related to shelters. The DUSIB has guaranteed that the question of capacity would not be a challenge. But there is a requirement to solidify the system in order to ensure that people seeking shelters are able to get them.”
(all pictures are owned by the author)
Credits:
Rishika Singh